The world is currently experiencing a telecommunications revolution. The days of everyone communicating solely over land lines, i.e. the public switched telephone network or PSTN, have long past. Mobile telecommunications has established itself as the future of telecommunications. With this evolution in telephony comes a need to change the way that people interact with telephonic devices.
The standard PSTN terminal, the desktop telephone with the familiar 12 key dial pad, was the paradigm for which initial mobile devices were built. Since the 1980's cellular telephones have been built around the 12 key dial pad comprising the digits 0–9 and the characters, “*” and “#”. The digits on the dial pad are respectively associated with three or more alphabetic characters. For example, the number 2 is associated with the characters “A”, “B”, and “C”. This is a useful feature for those wishing to provide a simple to remember word for their telephone number. For example, AT&T long distance uses the phone number 1-800-225-5288 which is the equivalent of 1-800-CALL-ATT.
While it is easy to remember this phrase for reaching AT&T, dialing the number required a user to pay careful attention to the small alpha characters on the keypad in order to enter the telephone number. This is enough of a challenge on a standard desktop phone, but when this must be performed on a small mobile telephone keypad, the task becomes much more difficult.
As mobile device design shifts away from the desktop paradigm, the keypad is often being replaced or augmented by other text entry methods. For example, many mobile platforms today have a full alphanumeric keypad installed or permit entry of text via pen strokes, e.g. a graffiti entry system on PalmOS mobile devices. Although these modern mobile platforms have the alternate entry means of an alphanumeric keypad or graffiti, users are still required to utilize the 12 digit keypad to painfully, manually convert text based phone numbers to numeric phone numbers.
The present invention is directed to overcoming one or more problems identified above.